This project centers around the premise that motivational and executive factors influence the deployment of newly acquired learning skills on transfer tests. Learning disabled (LD) and mentally retarded (MR) children are especially deficient in these processes, and hence are likely to have problems on tasks that require the generalization of skills. Our componential model of metacognition holds that to understand why inefficient learners succeed or fail on strategy transfer tests, a detailed history of the child's past experiences with other seemingly "irrelevant" strategies, ability to employ superordinate processes, and attributional beliefs about the role of strategies in producing efficient learning is required. This interactive perspective on metacognition is used to generate a series of eleven studies that cluster around four main objectives: (1) To assess the natural emergence of strategies, knowledge about memory-cognitive states, attributional beliefs, and executive skills in MR and LD children across a 5-year period. (2) To observe whether their attributional beliefs about the reasons for learning successes and failures can be modified during strategy training and, correspondingly, whether attributional retraining alters the course of strategy generalization. (3) To manipulate higher-level, executive processes in combination with strategy and attributional training, with a special concern for teaching learning handicapped children how to format specific strategies to a variety of transfer tasks. (4) To discover whether general strategy information, which we believe is common to a wide range of skills, can be taught through enriched instructions, resulting in more rapid acquisition of new strategies and more pronounced transfer of newly acquired strategies to generalization tests. The primary intent of this research is not so much to test the adequacy of the metacognitive model but rather to design theoretically-driven, mini-longitudinal, instructional research with LD and MR children that will advance our understanding of why inefficient learners often fail to generalize newly learned strategies. This goal is accomplished by incorporating motivational and metacognitive factors into traditional strategy training packages.